As the telecommunication industry has developed continuously, various new services emerge one after another. Authentication, authorization or accounting mechanism for services becomes increasingly mature and complex. Real-time charging has been more and more widely applied, and charge processing capability also has more important influences on service delivery. Currently, a charging process includes generation and report of a charging event, and rating processing. As for a real-time charging, operations such as balance reservation, abatement and reimbursement are further included. The charging event collects detailed information of services used by a user, including user identification (ID), a service type, a starting time to use, consumption, and quality of service. Once receiving a charging event, a charging system performs a charging processing according to information included in the charging event, together with the data subscribed by the user and the tariff configuration. In the case of the real-time charging, operations of balance reservation, abatement and reimbursement are also performed in cooperation with account management.
FIG. 1 is a schematic view of a real-time charging system in the conventional art. As shown in FIG. 1, services are used at user equipment 11 by accessing a network element 12. The network element 12 generates a charging event and sends the charging event to an online charging system 13 (OCS 13). The OCS 13 processes the charging event, including calculation of charges, credit authorization, balance freeze, consumption abatement and so on. During the charging processing, user data (including product tariffs, account balance, and the like) stored in a user database 14 is used. Once the user equipment 11 accesses the network element 12, the network element 12 requests to perform authentication and service authorization on the user. An authorization server 15 may employ a home subscriber server (HSS), home location register (HLR) or service control point (SCP) and utilize a user subscription database 16 (which may be an HSS/HLR) to identify the user's identity and determine whether the user has subscribed the requested service. A BSS/OSS system 17 is adapted to provide contents about services subscribed by the user and tariffs of the services when processing the user's billing or charging events, thereby implementing interaction of charging information and completing the charging processing.
Although the function of the real-time charging system meets the real-time charging requirements of corporation clients, it cannot meet requirements of the corporation clients about the separation of public accounts and private accounts.